In an era of algorithmic authority, The Hallucinating Archive proposes a critical reframing of the term “hallucination” as applied to generative AI. Rather than treating hallucinations as software bugs or epistemic failures, we examine them as expressions of deeper paradigmatic shifts — mirroring how the industrial and computational revolutions previously reshaped collective understandings of time, power, labour, and the self.

Drawing from our June 2025 symposium in Amsterdam, this talk foregrounds how synthetic media inherit their “truth-effects” not from direct referents, but from sedimented training data, latent images, and residual metadata embedded in archives, bureaucracies, and computational infrastructures. Through the lens of strategic adoption and disruptive refusal, we investigate how hallucinations are governed by and are a product of surveillance capitalist logics and varying degrees of technofeudalist opacities.

The hallucinated image, we argue, is not merely untrue, but structurally determined: a product of semiocapitalist abundance, post-truth ecosystems, and data commodification. These conditions demand new critical strategies including speculative and decolonial futurisms, guerrilla archiving, dataset poisoning, intentional recursive feedback looping, and mode collapse to interrogate and redirect machine storytelling. In this way, hallucinations are not outside the archive but constitute its newest operational mode.

We ask: What forms of trust, authorship, and collective memory emerge when generative systems become our primary narrators? What are the ethics of interpolated truth? And can we learn to navigate the synthetic uncanny not with suspicion, but with critical fluency?

Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter, born in 1985 and 1978 in the United States, live and work in Amsterdam, Netherlands. They have collaborated since 2015, producing video, sculpture, and installation works that engage with infrastructure, architecture, and systems of power. They are co-founders of Terminal Amsterdam, an artist-run space located in a former industrial site repurposed as a venue for exhibitions, events, and experimental publishing.

Their work has been exhibited at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo (BR), the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (IT), the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), Ditch Projects (Oregon), Jan van Eyck Open Studios (Netherlands), the Renaissance Society (Chicago), EXPO Chicago, and Contemporary Art Brussels (BE). Their projects have been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, the Oregon Arts Commission, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Ford Family Foundation.